Gurudevshri Rakeshji.
Football clubs, youth-run festivals and plain-spoken discourses on stress and purpose: how one spiritual teacher found a way to hold a generation that usually walks away
Ask a 24-year-old what spirituality means to them and you will often get a shrug. For many, it means rituals they were made to sit through as children, lectures that seemed to have little to do with their lives, and a vague sense that it is something to come back to "later".
Yet this is a generation carrying a lot. There is pressure to perform at work and at college, constant comparison on social media, and questions about purpose that a good salary does not seem to answer. Young people are anxious, searching and restless, and they are not finding the answers they need on their screens.
That gap, between what young people need and what religious spaces usually offer them, is one that Pujya Gurudevshri Rakeshji has spent years trying to close. The founder of Shrimad Rajchandra Mission Dharampur (SRMD) marks his 60th birth anniversary today. One of the clearest signs of how his work has grown is the number of young faces in the audience.
The first thing young listeners tend to notice is what he doesn't do. There is no talking down and no demand for blind faith. His discourses take the timeless teachings of the scriptures and decode them into plain language. They deal with things a young person faces every week: handling stress, finding purpose, staying emotionally steady, and becoming a better version of yourself.
Perhaps part of this comes from his own path. Before he became a spiritual guide, he was a student of philosophy. He earned an M.A. with a gold medal and then spent years on a doctoral study of Shri Atmasiddhi Shastra, the work of Shrimad Rajchandraji, the philosopher regarded as Mahatma Gandhi's spiritual guide. The treatise ran past 3,000 pages. Someone who has spent years wrestling with a text tends to welcome questions rather than discourage them. For a generation that is allergic to being told what to do, that openness matters. Language helps too. Many of his discourses are in English, including 'Choosing Consciously', the talk that opened his birthday celebrations in Mumbai this week. His own explanation of how he works with young people is short: they have the drive, he has said, but need the direction.
The Mission's youth programme is built on a framework it calls 5S: Satsang, Sadhana, Seva, Sanskruti and Sports. The first three are what you would expect: listening and discussion together, personal practice, and service. The last two are what make it work for young people. Sanskruti gives music, art and cultural expression a place inside spiritual life, rather than treating them as distractions from it. Sports is there because young people come back to places where they enjoy themselves.
That is not just a slogan. The organisation's football association, plays across India, the United States, Canada, England, the UAE and Singapore. On the pitch, discipline, teamwork and goal-setting are learnt by doing rather than being preached. The youth centres meet every fortnight, and a single session can move from discourse and meditation to group discussion, service, performance and sport. The programme is designed for people in their twenties and thirties, while older members move into quieter study groups, deliberately designing different formats for different stages of life.
The Global Youth Festival shows the approach at its largest. At its sixth edition in Mumbai, more than 150,000 young people took part. It was not a stage built for them by someone else: young volunteers planned, ran and staffed the whole event. The festival was organised into themed arenas covering wisdom, wellbeing, culture, creativity, adventure and social impact, where craft and music studios sat next to volunteer-led projects on the environment and community welfare. Retreats follow the same thinking, including a youth retreat that took hundreds of young people to Manali, in the Himalayas.
For many young people, the most convincing part is seva. The Mission's guiding line, to realise one's true self and serve others selflessly, treats inner growth and service as one discipline, giving a young volunteer somewhere real to put their energy. Shrimad Rajchandra Love and Care, the Mission's humanitarian arm, runs ten care programmes spanning health, education, women, animals, the environment and emergency relief, holding Special Consultative Status with the UN Economic and Social Council. Meeting the tangible needs of youth, the Mission also launched Shrimad Rajchandra DISHA, a free, AI-powered career guidance platform supported by the Government of India that offers psychometric assessments and personalized pathways across more than 1,600 careers.
For some young people, the search leads all the way. During Gurudevshri's 60th birthday celebrations, several young, highly educated seekers from different corners of the world are taking Atmarpit Diksha, a lifelong vow to dedicate their lives to spiritual pursuit and selfless service. They join a community of Atmarpits, most of whom took the vow as young adults, leaving behind corporate and professional careers to help run the Mission's global seva initiatives. Born in Mumbai on September 26, 1966, Gurudevshri earned an M.A., a doctorate conferred by the University of Mumbai in 1998, and an honorary Doctor of Divinity from the Claremont School of Theology. He founded the Mission in 1994 and established its ashram at Dharampur in South Gujarat in 2001, which now anchors a movement spanning hundreds of cities and five continents. As thousands of devotees gather at Mumbai's Jio World Convention Centre for 'Aho Gurudev', the striking number of young people in the hall may be the most telling detail of all.
